S. Awan is a failed journalist, a student of history, a lover of music, film, culture, and an enthusiast of the the controversial and the weird.
Also a musician, and part-time freelance, involuntary human being. Also occasionally lives on the moon. Also is a ghost. And a cigarette butt that hasn't been put out properly; so, you know, there's still, like, smoke coming out of it and stuff...

Just when you thought the massive, endless distraction/pantomime of Planet Trump couldn’t get any sillier, the President ditches his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: and is replacing him with who? Oh, just the head of the CIA.

What’s even dumber is that, given all of the mainstream media hysteria over alleged Trump ‘collusion’ with Russia, the President chose to announce Tillerson’s redundancy right after Tillerson had publicly criticised Russia for its alleged involvement in the nerve-agent incident in Salisbury.

Shit like this often makes me wonder if most of what we’re seeing really might be a scripted play, playing out a contrived narrative to drag us towards some sort of prefabricated end-point. Even more curious, Trump himself – as a number of UK-based commentators have noted – said nothing at all about the Salisbury incident: only Tillerson chose to speak on the matter – and then Trump dumped him immediately.

I mean, even speaking as someone who thinks the Salisbury incident was probably a false-flag, it looked incredibly conspicuous that Trump dumped Tillerson as soon as Tillerson criticised Russia. Couldn’t he have waited a few weeks to announce it?

Even dumber, Trump announced this decision to the world via Twitter – Tillerson himself (Trump’s own Secretary of State) claims he only found out about it because of the tweet and had had no communication on the matter at all from the President.

What’s Trump’s problem with Tillerson – other than Tillerson calling him “a moron”?

For one thing, Tillerson is apparently more in favor of the United States sticking with the Iran nuclear deal – while Trump, as has been clear for a long time, wants that deal trashed so that he and Netanyahu can isolate and corner Iran.

Not that Tillerson has been entirely off-script when it comes to foreign policy: one of the oddest things about the Trump administration’s sudden change-of- heart on Syria last year was, as noted here, that both Trump and Tilerson had been literally saying that Bashar Assad could stay in power, only to both change their minds entirely a day or two later, after which both were saying “Assad must go”.

It struck me as very curious – and very suspect – at the time that they both changed their script within literally a couple of days; suggesting (at least to me anyway) that they were both being coerced from some unspecified agency.

Now, despite playing ball on the Syria propaganda programme, Tillerson finds himself out of favour.

Who replaces Tillerson? Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA. Pompeo is a hardline war-hawk who wants to go after Iran, who has called for the execution of Edward Snowden, and who many observers say will encourage or reinforce both Trump’s Islamophobic tendencies and his militaristic mindset.

And who moves in to replace Pompeo as head of the CIA? According to most reports, it’s Black-Ops expert Gina Haspel – a woman who, last year, was the subject of an arrest warrant sought by a Berlin-based human rights group. Haspel established the CIA’s first foreign ‘Black Site’ (in Thailand) for the alleged torture of terror suspects. She and her colleagues also illegally destroyed the video tapes of the alleged torture.

Trump’s tendency seems to be to get rid of people who challenge him or provide inconvenient views and to replace them with people who are much more likely to agree with his leanings.

This makes some sense. Tillerson wasn’t on the same page as Trump when it comes to the Iran situation – Pompeo very much is.

H.R McMaster is clearly going to be the next to go.

The Marcus-Aurelius-loving, philosophical General Mattis is probably – by this logic – going to be axed somewhere down the line too. Mattis too is reported to clash with the President on some key issues. For one thing, Mattis is against the use of torture – which puts him at odds with the torture-loving Trump and Pompeo.

I’m actually starting to feel sorry for General Mattis – I keep noticing the expression on his face whenever he’s shown in the presence of the rest of the administration. He is beginning to look like a hostage. Tillerson was starting to have the same expression.

McMaster’s removal has been predicted for some time. McMaster is another of those who is reported to disagree with Trump on a number of issues and therefore is an inconvenience – not just to Trump, but to the Zionist faction in the White House.

The Zionist Organisation of America, led by billionaire Sheldon Adelson, has been pushing for McMaster to be removed for some time already – on account of his perceived lack of enthusiasm for pro-Israeli policies and his support for the Iranian nuclear deal. The Zionist elements in Washington and in Trump’s administration want McMaster out.

There might be a common theme in both Tillerson’s and McMasters’ situations (aside from the fact that Tillerson called Trump “a moron” and McMaster has reportedly called Trump “an idiot”). Chemi Shalev, writing at Haaretz, suggests ‘Tillerson’s sacking will shock the world but delight Israel’.

And if replacing Tillerson with Pompeo seems ominous, a likely replacement being touted for McMaster is the extreme Neo-Con, serial liar, conspirator and war-hawk John Bolton.

The same John Bolton, who as mentioned here shortly before Trump’s inauguration, helped the Bush administration fabricate ‘evidence’ or justifications for the Iraq War. And, like Pompeo, he is a hardline war-hawk who wants to go after Iran and North Korea, and who many observers say will encourage or reinforce Trump’s Islamophobic tendencies and militaristic mindset.

Bolton was in fact considered a ‘temperamental risk’ by George W. Bush – which is saying something.

Aside from being an insane war-hawk and liar (and having a reputation for being highly abusive to staff and co-workers and to use intimidation to force people to comply with his wishes), Bolton is also a Fox News and Breitbart favorite and darling of the alt-right, who supported the alt-right conspiracy theory that President Obama was a ‘secret Muslim’ and the farcical theory that the United States government was being infiltrated by Muslims in a secret takeover.

Bolton also fittingly wrote the foreword to a book by two of the most prominent wealthy American ‘alt-right’ Zionists, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, in 2010.

To give a flavor of what to expect from Bolton (who looks like someone who’s been transported here from a previous century), in a New York Timespiece in 2015, Bolton called for a US/Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities instead of the Obama/Kerry-sponsored negotiations.

Bolton also supports the idea of first-strike nuclear weapons use by the US – which means that he is perfectly in-line with the policy-shift outlined in the previously-mentioned Nuclear Posture Review. Presumably, so is Pompeo.

Hilariously, and in a continuing effort to remain credible or relevant, psy-op merchants Paul Joseph Watson and Info Wars have predictably portrayed Pompeo’s appointment as Trump “draining the swamp”: though how the head of the CIA taking over the State Department is ‘draining the swamp’ is left to the imagination.

At any rate, the impression is very much of a rag-tag, cowboy administration in permanent disarray, with very little loyalty, mutual respect or unified vision holding it together. The only unifying factors likely to be left in the administration soon are the Zionist faction, the CIA and the miltiary-industrial complex.

Very little that has transpired so far in this Trump administration has encouraged me to re-evaluate my views from before the inauguration. I wrote then that we were going to witness the ‘return of the Neo-Cons’ and specifically highlighted the creeping presence of both John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. In essence, what Trump appears to be doing is favoring the most hawkish, aggressive, pro-torture, pro-war figures he can find and sidelining anyone who might otherwise provide some counter-balance.

A suspicious mind would suspect key people are being moved in to or out of key positions in order to pave the way for something that’s planned for the near future.

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Every day, the disastrous Trump horror show grows more outrageous and frightening than the day before! That so many in my country still support him, not to mention the complicity of the deaf, dumb & blind GOP, is positively sickening.

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